Analyzing and benchmarking existing email campaigns is the fastest way to hit the ground running when it comes to learning, understanding, and implementing effective email marketing strategies for your brand.
Benchmarking email marketing campaigns—be it frequency of emails sent, the type of automated email journeys brands (in your industry or others), creatives, angles, and offers—doesn’t have to be hard though.
With tools like Panoramata, you have access to thousands of email campaigns across hundreds of brands spanning various industries at your fingertips.
Note: Sign up for Panoramata now and follow along, create your email marketing lists for inspiration, for email marketing strategy benchmarking, and more.
Email Marketing Metrics to Track and How to Benchmark Newsletters
Here’s an overview of the Panoramata's newsletter search engine:
When you pick a brand (in any industry), what should you look at? How do you break down a newsletter? How do you make sense of all the information made available to you?
Let’s answer those questions.
Here’s how to analyze existing brands, dig into email marketing campaigns that work, and how to benchmark newsletters:
Step 1: Email Marketing Calendar, Frequency, Days & Sending Time
Some brands send too many emails. Some send way too few. Should you send too many emails or very few emails? What’s the email marketing frequency that works best?
The answer: it depends.
What’s for sure is that not sending emails at all is terrible for business. Meanwhile, sending too many emails can irritate your customers while sending too few can cause your customers to simply forget about you.
That’s why email marketing frequency is critical.
Pick any of the available brands within Panoramata and you’ll instantly get all the details you’ll need.
Here’s an example:
In an instant, you’ll be able to see the latest emails sent, along with subject lines (more on this below), weekly average number of email marketing messages sent, daily averages (if any), and how emails are distributed in a week.
As a bonus, you also get “good-to-know” information such as average number of characters in the subject line, words often used, emoji use, average spam score, and more.
Look at a few popular brands and you’ll immediately get a sense of how frequently email marketing messages are sent, the types of emojis used, subject lines, etc.
On the page tab, you’ll also be able to click through and see the actual campaigns, email journeys (if any), software used, snapshots, ads, and insights for each brand.
Step 2: Email Subject Lines & Email Headers
Subject lines are everything. Subject lines for email campaigns will make or break your performance.
More than 64% of your email user base will open emails just based on the subject lines, just as 69% of your customers or subscribers will mark an email as “spam” based on the subject lines alone.
There are various tips and tricks to use better performing subject lines. Hutte has several ideas for writing high-performing subject lines.
Some of the ideas are:
- Incentive-based subject lines (XX% off or XX% Discount for 24 hrs only)
- Curiosity-inducing subject lines (“We’ve got something for you”, “Surprise Gift, For Your Eyes Only”)
- Suggestive subject lines
- Product mention subject lines
… and many others.
Pay attention to the types of subject lines brands are using by using Panoramata by quickly looking through hundreds of brands with the precise information you need.
Learn. Use. Test. Iterate. Relaunch.
Step 3: Email Marketing Brand Voice
The “voice”—the style, the language you use, and how well you can connect with your target audience—really determines just how well you position yourself as a brand and how you do as a business.
The “brand voice” is often ignored in email marketing messages though. The more you are able to connect (with the kind of language your ideal target audience uses), the better you do.
To make it easier for you as to how exactly brands use their voice, you’d only have to look at some email campaigns.
Need an example? See how Parade uses its own voice in one of its emails:
Step 4: Email Marketing Copy, Images, Offers, Angles, & Buttons
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or the world’s best marketer to think of multiple ways to write email copy, use images, present offers, experiment with various creative angles, and the copy that you should use for primary (and secondary, if any) buttons within emails.
Learn from the best and apply what you learn to your own email marketing campaigns.
You can also learn to be better than the brands. Here’s an example from Sons UK.
In the example above, you’ll notice that Sons UK does a lot of things right but doesn’t include buttons where it says “Get 40% Off”.
More than 64% of your email user base will open emails just based on the subject lines, just as 69% of your customers or subscribers will mark an email as “spam” based on the subject lines alone.
When looking at campaigns, either follow what other brands do or do better than those brands. That’s the whole point of benchmarking email campaigns, right?
- Types of emails (and when they are being sent or how frequently they are sent)
- Email marketing copywriting
- Images and product photos used
- Offers made
- The creative angles
- Colors and design
- Button copy
Apply what you learn to your own campaigns.
Step 5: Email Anatomy & Email Campaign Structure
Whether your business is product-based or service-based, there are ways to cleverly structure your emails to maximize and optimize your email campaigns.
For instance, you’d want to place the most important offer or the most profitable product, or the bestselling products at the top of the email.
Notice what Glossier does for their product FutureDew in the email example above: The top of the email which features what the brand wants you to do first (click on the button). Then, the email message is followed by secondary actions (shop favorites) that customers can take—other products, other buttons, and so on.
When you are inside Panoramata, open some of the recently sent email campaigns to observe what other eCommerce brands do as far as the email marketing message anatomy, the design, and the placement of the offers.
Step 6: Email Deliverability
When it comes to benchmarking newsletters, deliverability rates shouldn’t be ignored.
An email’s deliverability rate refers to the number of emails your subscribers receive versus the number of total emails you send out. It’s a good statistic to check because it’s part of what makes an email marketing campaign successful.
If your emails are constantly flagged as spam or don’t reach your subscribers, your efforts will be wasted. That’s why it’s crucial to find out the average deliverability rate for competitor brands and see if you’re up to par with them.
Step 7: Email Marketing Types, Email Journeys, & More
We reserved the best for last: email marketing types, email journeys, and various other things you could do with email marketing.
From a vantage point, we are really talking about email marketing automations (of which there are many types right there).
For each brand in any of the available industries available inside Panoramata, you’ll also be able to see “email journeys”.
Here’s an example of one of the email journeys Purple uses.
Notice how Purple spaces out and creates an email journey to welcome new customers (or email subscribers).
With four emails in total for this journey, it’s purpose-built to make the best of not only an expected welcome sequence with email marketing but also revenue-focused sales email messages in the later part of the journey.
Each email itself comes with relevant product photos, offers, call-to-action buttons, appropriate subject lines, copy (on brand), and more.
Benchmarking email marketing campaigns doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. Use Panoramata to get the best email marketing examples from brands spread out over various industries, down to the details.
Step 9: Seasons and Big Holidays
When you benchmark newsletters, it’s also useful to analyze what campaigns other brands are running for major occasions and holidays such as Black Friday, summer, Christmas, back-to-school, and Labor Day.
There’s a wealth of great ideas that can inspire you and ideas you can build upon for your content calendar.
Want more ideas and inspiration? Check out our email swipe file below with over 100 newsletter ideas you can use for your next campaign.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to analyze email marketing performance?
To analyze email marketing performance, track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates using tools like Panoramata.
Additionally, segment your email list to assess the effectiveness of personalized campaigns and A/B test different email elements to optimize results.
How to measure newsletter performance?
To measure newsletter performance, monitor metrics like open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and the overall engagement time with your content.
Use these insights to benchmark against industry standards and adjust your content, subject lines, and sending frequency to improve performance.
